We
do not need any more actors directors playwrights designers critics.
We do not need any more love, hate, psychology, politics, history,
space,
intimacy, stages, or especially money.
We need so much that we can't need anything but a theatre of the
mind.

Crawl
through the dark cave of mind that is the womb of all theatre and
you
will discover the theatre of the mind. The theatre of the mind is
the
loudest, brightest, most theatrical space in all of creation. It
is
collective and individual, invisible and all envisioning, narcissistic
and
universal, beautiful and ugly and brutal and tender; it is the only
theatrical hope/experience that keeps us going back and back, performance
after putrid performance; it is why we love to read the plays of
Shakespeare, to enact the magic incantation of their story heart
and
language smell in our minds and why so often its stagings disappoint,
frustrate and limit our imaginings. The theatre of the mind is the
stage of
perfect wonder that each one of us and every one of us ever smitten
by live
performance longs to see again, a lost Eden that comes so easily
in our
secret thought and appears so hard to realize on the living stage.
And it
is a tragedy-- this loss of a live, transformative theatre, this
cavern of
twisting into labyrinth into gorge into ocean and sky because we
need its
external presence as a people, as community to act in the very fact
of its
occurring as omen, talisman, catalyst, to dream out the potentiality
of
life; to dream a new blue print of civilization, together.

When
I was a child, a stage could be anything--a piece of the linoleum
basement floor, the top of the oval chrome and formica kitchen table,
the
rotting top step of the back porch stoop, an empty grandmother's
bed, a
patch of dirt under a willow tree. It could be anything and with
some words
and performers and watchers (sometimes just two people who kept
trading
places with each other) we en-acted the great battles of good and
evil and
the dilemma of greed, the hunger of selfishness, for an arrested
breath of
time we could be glorious, heroic, in harmony with the earth under
our
feet and the sky above our dreams. Children play, live together
in the
theatre of the mind with all its darkened nooks and bright alleys;
there
they meet and spin the promise of our future and learn to become
the adult
actors of history to come.

The
theatre of the mind defies the narrow stage definition of time--time
man-made gives way to time star-made and rock-made; rain-made and
earthquake-made.

This
is a theatre you can dwell in--as actor and audience, both actor
and
audience--for the rest of your life and for the time before and
after your
living, before fame money power ambitions and other theatrical delusions
came to play upon your mind, to cut it up into apartment complexes,
factories, and statements.

Sole
condition of a theatre of the mind
that it cannot be done
(that it is as Plato's perfect bed;
the pure, conceptual pre-
textual non material ideal of all
fabrication. But, despite all this,
it is the least cerebral of
all performances; it is the most active, most
impossibly alive.)

In
the painted cave of the theatre of the mind are the actors of the
theatre of the mind--a sea bed throng of signs and questions, humans
and
beasts; monsters and butterflies all
of whom we recognize/have seen before in our sleep and our moments
outside of linear birth to death time and dreaming of illimitable
sky. Now
here they come, these performers, perpetrators of our dreams, parading
like
a beauty pageant-- weddings and murders, pairings and disappearing
taking
place right before our unwatchable eyes where each of us sees the
play
unfold exactly as her own soul requires.

In
the theatre of the mind things are never as comforting or as
recognizable as they seem. Here, plot is a trap, character a land
mine--you enter one broken being after another, survive one explosion
after
another; the fragment of you, the audience, that is left is the
play to be
performed live at that moment in your head in dialogue with the
life on
stage that night so that each night of theatre of the mind is a
thousand
nights of theatre, a thousand different plays being performed on
stage in
the dark cave behind the curtain of audience eyes all at once, each
play a
different one--the broken bits of humanity that speak therefore
journey
like the constellations in the sky. And yet, for the theatre of
the mind to
thrive we need the living stage to serve as the catalyst and clearing
house
between minds, engendering a vital, imaginative, ethical community
of minds
with common foes and goals and most of all a common language, a
vocabulary
of discourse that does not reduce but expand ad infinitum our possibilities
as human beings.

The
theatre of the mind is the theatre of yearning, humanity's yearning
where we admit/confess to the darkened stage and the light flooded
finale
that it is impossible for any one play to speak to see to hear whole.
Through the theatre of the mind of mosaic visions this wholeness
of sense
that is ultimately denied us can at least be glimpsed, in a
thousand clapping hands in each of our own theatres of the mind,
echoed and
beckoned and seduced to performance by the theatre of the impossible
set
upon the stage that night.

Aspects
of space and imagination in the theatre of the mind
Here stage space is a book in which the makers of theatre of the
mind
write down dreams and fears to be 'read' by the audience who are
themselves
writing other books in the theatres of their minds. This book that
is the
theatre of the mind is like the medieval stained glass walls of
cathedrals.
You can read them as sign and story--loud bright bloody vocal outpourings
of myth. In the theatre of the mind that is the illuminated manuscript
of
images, the images don't move but the audience moves, from mansion
to
mansion, station to station in the house of wonder agony and compassion
that is our common home. The compassion comes when the show is over,
a
death of signs and acts, the final peace from the exhausting accretion
of
overwhelming life.

The
theatre of the mind says:
How dare you pretend to resolve anything? How dare you erase the
resonance
of myth, the germinal of theatre, by dividing it into 'acts'; budgeting
it
into this character and that; calling forth beginning middle and
end when
the sole purpose of theatre as the locus of memorialized action
is to set
the individual on journey after journey of discovery (which is the
movement
of text, of 'forwarding the action' or plot in the theatre of the
mind)
until a play's end is the pile up/collision of a series of explorations
into the sense of universe; wherein the character traveling is not
just
himself but a voice of the unison--the compilation of all characters--an
illumination burning itself up with life on a field of darkness
which is
the stage at the beginning and end of every drama. Action in the
theatre of
the mind is the playing out of hands, the turning over of a deck
of chance
illuminations, placed one atop the next until there is so much overlay
of
light we come to the thankfulness of darkness, of ending, again.
Then we
are again at the beginning so that the theatre of the mind whose
individual
play pieces may appear diametrically opposed are always the detritus
of the
same never ending show.

Actions
for a theatre of the mind
wind
walking
sun
speaking
gesture
of taste
sight
of sound
will
burning itself up
destiny
melting down
courage
singing

Images
for an theatre of the mind
atom
banquet
bacteria
dance
worm
choir in dirt bath
jaguar
eyes
medieval
flat perspective overlaid with
quick time movies
movie
stars pasted in the eyes of enormous
TV screens
that walk the stage like
lamplighters in renaissance
time
algae
and fish life flying through
underwater waves
elbow
landscape
the
stage a tank of sharks
the
stage a solar system with planets,
moons, fallen
stars
the
stage empty but for magnified dirt on
its floor
boards, amplified sound in its wings
the
stage empty but for the tears and
hisses of audiences
who cannot bear to go to
hear to see anymore
the kindergarten of lies
put before them when
they came to play out
the end game of
cosmos.

Elements
of a theatre of the mind
black
holes
fractals
lip
stick stains on galaxies
hip
hop music and magic spells recorded
live on CNN
language
of distinctive voice without
definable meaning
as we beg to know it and
debase it; the
word, the poor holy word
a
certain kind of weeping which only the
heavens
can.

The
theatre of the mind refuses to answer any questions; in fact, it
seeks
to kill all answers (the catharsis of tragedy) which strews the
proscenium
with a sea of irrefutable dogmatic blood that rationalizes the forward
march of history. In the theatre of the mind, all answers are beaten
into
questions. All the images and text of the theatre of the mind are
pre-text
for unanswerable questions. The theatre of the mind is the stage
of these
unanswerable questions and thereby the theatre of the miraculous.

characters
of the theatre of the mind
lightning thunder earthquake volcano
meteorite rain
comet
blast
all angels of air and its dragons
all denizens of the deep
amputated limbs
pure mouths rescued of bodies
the blood after cold blooded murder
heaven
the rotund earth
what we call divine

In the theatre of the mind, language kills and in the best of senses;
that
is to annihilate into other wondrous matter. Words here are visceral
and
the fortress of language with its bricks of sound, rhythm, and alphabet-
vowel-consonant
cliché innuendo context pretext make up the iconic
language which is the vicious unassuagable appetite of the theatre
of the
mind.

A theatre
that you see and hear in your mind as you walk through the days
that walk you through your life.

the
matter of plot or story lines of theatre of the mind
the
story of the big bang
the
story of the creation of love in the western world
the
story of war on earth
the
story of earth
the
story of separation

conditions
for the theatre of the mind
no money
no theories
no subscribers
to placate
hunger,
thirst
joyful
dirt
no specializations
or division of labor among the
artists
a diviner's
gift of salvaging garbage treasure
a green
thumb for resurrecting raw materials:
the
stage as the tramp's last supper

In
the theatre of the mind are a thousand roving characters who may
be
performed by one or a million actors on the stage who turn into
each other
as readily as reproducing and dividing paramecium. Consistency of
anything--plot, character action point of view--has no place here
for we
are inside the action of time where nothing stands still or remains
the
same--neither star nor rock plate is without its parallel eternal
metamorphosis. This is the drama and cast of the theatre of the
mind.
(she who was there, is not)
We go to the theatre neither to see nor hear nor understand; we
go to dream.

aims
of the theatre of the mind
to
have and foster revelation
a notion of our limitlessness and
our obscurity
a coming to beauty after devastation
screaming, laughing, weeping
to do away with all blue haired matinee
ladies
to scare off all those who demand
to know what the play is
about
to create the equivalent of a rose
growing in quick time
and slow motion that you can touch
and smell inside your self
to be reminded of wonder and magic
everywhere

To
forge alchemists and theatre of the mind makers for an impossible
theatre of us all; a theatre alive and on stage that is as magical
for the
collective as the solitary one within.